Representing narratives in digital libraries: the narrative ontology
Meghini C., Bartalesi V., Metilli D.
Digital Libraries (DLs), especially in the Cultural Heritage domain, are rich in narratives. Every digital object in a DL tells some kind of story, regardless of the medium, the genre, or the type of the object. However, DLs do not offer services about narratives, for example it is not possible to discover a narrative, to create one, or to compare two narratives. Certainly, DLs offer discovery functionalities over their contents, but these services merely address the objects that carry the narratives (e.g. books, images, audiovisual objects), without regard for the narratives themselves. The present work aims at introducing narratives as first-class citizens in DLs, by providing a formal expression of what a narrative is. In particular, this paper presents a conceptualisation of the domain of narratives, and its specification through the Narrative Ontology (NOnt for short), expressed in first-order logic. NOnt has been implemented as an extension of three standard vocabularies, i.e. the CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and OWL Time, and using the SWRL rule language to express the axioms. On the basis of NOnt, we have developed the Narrative Building and Visualising (NBVT) tool, and applied it in four case studies to validate the ontology. NOnt is also being validated in the context of the Mingei European project, in which it is applied to the representation of knowledge about Craft Heritage.Source: Semantic web (Print) 12 (2021): 241–264. doi:10.3233/SW-200421
DOI: 10.3233/sw-200421
Project(s): Mingei 
See at:
Semantic Web 
| content.iospress.com | Semantic Web | CNR ExploRA
Representation and Presentation of Culinary Tradition as Cultural Heritage
Partarakis N., Kaplanidi D., Doulgeraki P., Karuzaki E., Petraki A., Metilli D., Bartalesi V., Adami I., Meghini C., Zabulis X.
This paper presents a knowledge representation framework and provides tools to allow the representation and presentation of the tangible and intangible dimensions of culinary tradition as cultural heritage including the socio-historic context of its evolution. The representation framework adheres to and extends the knowledge representation standards for the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain while providing a widely accessible web-based authoring environment to facilitate the representation activities. In strong collaboration with social sciences and humanities, this work allows the exploitation of ethnographic research outcomes by providing a systematic approach for the representation of culinary tradition in the form of recipes, both in an abstract form for their preservation and in a semantic representation of their execution captured on-site during ethnographic research.Source: Heritage (Basel) Online 4 (2021): 612–640. doi:10.3390/heritage4020036
DOI: 10.3390/heritage4020036
Project(s): Mingei
See at:
ISTI Repository 
| CNR ExploRA | Heritage | Heritage
HDN Annotation Tool
Bartalesi Lenzi V., Pratelli N., Metilli D., Meghini C.
To facilitate the process of populating the ontology developed within the Hypermedia Dante Network (HDN) project (PRIN 2020-2023), we implemented a semi-automatic tool called HDN Annotation Tool. The tool supports scholars to build a knowledge base of the primary sources of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. The tool was developed using a Python backend with the Django framework, and a frontend built with HTML5, JavaScript, and the Bootstrap library. It takes as input the JSON file, where the knowledge automatically extracted from the corpus of the Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP) is stored and shows the relevant information in the corresponding fields of the tool interface. After analyzing the commentaries of the DDP, scholars use the interface of the tool to insert knowledge about primary sources. The tool is accessible through the HDN-Lab, which is the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) of the project, hosted on the D4Science infrastructure.
See at: dante.d4science.org | CNR ExploRA
The Hypermedia Dante Network Project
Tomazzoli G., Livraghi L. M. G., Metilli D., Pratelli N., Bartalesi V.
In this paper, we present the Hypermedia Dante Network (HDN) project. First, we briefly introduce the relevant state of the art on Dante's commentaries and their digital representation, and we outline the project goals. In the main section, we present the core features of the HDN ontology, an evolution of the DanteSources ontology that aims at representing knowledge about Dante's primary sources as they are identified by a vast range of commentaries. Then, we describe the tool that has been developed to process Dante's commentaries and populate the HDN ontology. Finally, we comment on the project's usability and possible outcomes for both scholars and common users.Source: AIUCD 2021 - DH per la società: e-guaglianza, partecipazione, diritti e valori nell'era digitale, pp. 269–274, Pisa, 19-22/01/2021
See at:
aiucd2021.labcd.unipi.it | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA
Towards a knowledge base of medieval and renaissance geographical Latin works: the IMAGO ontology
Bartalesi V., Metilli D., Pratelli N., Pontari P.
In this article we present the first achievement of the Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum (IMAGO)--Italian National Research Project (2020-23), that is, the ontology we have created in order to formally represent the knowledge about the geographical works written in Middle Ages and Renaissance (6th-15th centuries). The IMAGO ontology is derived from a strict collaboration between the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and the scholars who are involved in the project, who have supported ISTI-CNR in defining a conceptualization of the domain of knowledge. Following the re-use logic, we have selected as reference ontologies the International Committee on Documentation CRM vocabulary and its extension FRBRoo, including its in-progress reformulation, LRMoo. This research is included in a wider project context whose final aim is the creation of a knowledge base (KB) of Latin geographic literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance Humanism in which the data are formally represented following the Linked Open Data paradigm and using the Semantic Web languages. At the end of the project, this KB will be accessed through a Web application that allows retrieving and consulting the collected data in a user-friendly way for scholars and general users, e.g. tables, maps, CSV files.Source: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2021). doi:10.1093/llc/fqab060
DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqab060
See at:
ISTI Repository | academic.oup.com | CNR ExploRA
The IMAGO project: towards a knowledge base of medieval and renaissance geographical works
Bartalesi Lenzi V., Pratelli N.
The image of the world created by the Medieval and Renaissance culture was crucial to the development of Western thought in European history. To the best of our knowledge Medieval and Renaissance geographical works have not been studied using digital methods.
The three years (2020-2023) Italian National research project IMAGO - Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum - aims at providing a systematic overview of this literature using Semantic Web technologies. As the first step to develop tools to support scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a knowledge base (KB) of the geographical works, we created an OWL 2 DL ontology. Following the re-use logic and to maximize the interoperability, we developed the ontology as an extension of two reference ontologies, that is the CIDOC CRM vocabulary and its extension FRBRoo, including its in-progress reformulation, LRMoo. In this paper, we present the project, the ontology and the tool to populate it that we developed. Furthermore, we present a preliminary study to map the works collected in the IMAGO KB and the manuscripts stored in the KB of the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project.Source: SWODCH 2021 - International Joint Workshop on Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural Heritage, Bolzano, 20-21/09/2021
See at:
ceur-ws.org | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA
Representation and preservation of heritage crafts
Zabulis X., Meghini C., Partarakis N., Beisswenger C., Dubois A., Fasoula M., Nitti V., Ntoa S., Adami I., Chatziantoniou A., Bartalesi V., Metilli D., Stivaktakis N., Patsiouras N., Doulgeraki P., Karuzaki E., Stefanidi E., Qammaz A., Kaplanidi D., Neumann-janssen I., Denter U., Hauser H., Petraki A., Stivaktakis I., Mantinaki E., Rigaki A., Galanakis G.
This work regards the digital representation of tangible and intangible dimensions of heritage crafts, towards craft preservation. Based on state-of-the-art digital documentation, knowledge representation and narrative creation approach are presented. Craft presentation methods that use the represented content to provide accurate, intuitive, engaging, and educational ways for HC presentation and appreciation are proposed. The proposed methods aim to contribute to HC preservation, by adding value to the cultural visit, before, and after it.Source: Sustainability (Basel) 12 (2020): 1–26. doi:10.3390/su12041461
DOI: 10.3390/su12041461
Project(s): Mingei
See at:
Sustainability | Sustainability | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA | Sustainability | Sustainability | ZENODO
Catalogue of E-RIHS resources and services
Meghini C., Benassi L., Galeotti M., Bartalesi V., Concordia C., Castillejo M., Calvo C., Andreassi E., Striova J.
The Deliverable 8.1 describes the work carried in Task 8.3 "Catalogue of E-RIHS resources and services". With the term resource we intend any entity that may be of interest to a Infrastructure such as the one that the E-RIHS PP project is setting up, i.e. mainly datasets and services, but also people, organizations, instruments, and other entities. The catalogue aims at providing researchers with information related to Heritage Science resources available within E-RIHS through a formal model that helps categorising them according to their different features. Such features will also be used for discovering the resources in the Catalogue.
The catalogue structure was designed to serve as the basis for accounting in-kind contributions and, in perspective, to be a single access point for resource discovery and access services.Source: Research report, E-RIHS PP, 739503, 2020
Project(s): E-RIHS PP
See at:
CNR ExploRA
AIMH research activities 2020
Aloia N., Amato G., Bartalesi V., Benedetti F., Bolettieri P., Carrara F., Casarosa V., Ciampi L., Concordia C., Corbara S., Esuli A., Falchi F., Gennaro C., Lagani G., Massoli F. V., Meghini C., Messina N., Metilli D., Molinari A., Moreo A., Nardi A., Pedrotti A., Pratelli N., Rabitti F., Savino P., Sebastiani F., Thanos C., Trupiano L., Vadicamo L., Vairo C.
Annual Report of the Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities laboratory (AIMH) research activities in 2020.
See at:
ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA
Introducing narratives in Europeana: a case study
Meghini C., Bartalesi V., Metilli D., Benedetti F.
We present a preliminary study to introduce narratives as a first-class functionality in digital libraries. The general idea is to enrich those libraries with semantic networks of events providing a meaningful contextualisation of the digital libraries' objects. More specific motivations are presented through a set of use cases by different actors who would benefit from using narratives for different purposes. Then, we consider a specific digital library, Europeana, the largest European digital library in the cultural heritage domain. We discuss how the Europeana Data Model could be extended for representing narratives, and we introduce an ontology for narratives. We also present a semi-automatic tool, which, on the basis of the ontology, supports the creation and visualisation of narratives, and we show how the tool has been employed to create a narrative of the life of the painter Gustav Klimt as a case study. In particular, we focus our attention on the functionality of the tool that allows extracting and proposing to the user specific digital objects for each event of the narrative.Source: International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science 29 (2019): 7–16. doi:10.2478/amcs-2019-0001
DOI: 10.2478/amcs-2019-0001
See at:
International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science | International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science | International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science | International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science | International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA | www.amcs.uz.zgora.pl | International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science | International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science
Populating narratives using Wikidata events: an initial experiment
Metilli D., Bartalesi V., Meghini C., Aloia N.
The study presented in this paper is part of our research aimed at improving the search functionalities of current Digital Libraries using formal narratives. Narratives are intended as sequences of events. We present the results of an initial experiment to detect and extract implicit events from the Wikidata knowledge base in order to construct a narrative in a semi-automatic way. Wikidata contains many historical entities, but comparably few events. The reason is that most events in Wikidata are represented in an implicit way, e.g. by listing a date of birth instead of having an event of type "birth". For this reason, we decided to generate what we call the Wikidata Event Graph (WEG), i.e. the graph of implicit events found in Wikidata. We performed an initial experiment taking as case study the narrative of the life of Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Only one event of the life of Dante is explicitly represented in Wikidata as instance of the class Q1190554 Occurrence. Using the WEG, we were able to automatically detect 31 more events of Dante's life that were present in Wikidata in an implicit way.Source: ICRDL 2019 - 15th Italian Research Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 159–166, Pisa, Italy, 31 Juanry - 01 February 2019
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-11226-4_13
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1489713
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2555042
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1489714
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2555043
See at:
ISTI Repository | ISTI Repository | ZENODO | zenodo.org | academic.microsoft.com | dblp.uni-trier.de | link.springer.com | link.springer.com | CNR ExploRA
A Wikidata-based tool for building and visualising narratives
Metilli D., Bartalesi V., Meghini C.
In this paper we present a semi-automatic tool for constructing and visualising narratives, intended as networks of events related to each other by semantic relations. The tool obeys an ontology for narratives that we developed. It retrieves and assigns internationalised resource identifiers to the instances of the classes of the ontology using Wikidata as an external knowledge base and also facilitates the construction and contextualisation of events, and their linking to form the narratives. The knowledge collected by the tool is automatically saved as an Web ontology language graph. The tool also allows the visualisation of the knowledge included in the graph in simple formats like tables, network graphs and timelines. We have carried out an initial qualitative evaluation of the tool. As case study, an historian from the University of Pisa has used the tool to build the narrative of Dante Alighieri's life. The evaluation has regarded the effectiveness of the tool and the satisfaction of the users' requirements.Source: International journal on digital libraries (Internet) 20 (2019): 417–432. doi:10.1007/s00799-019-00266-3
DOI: 10.1007/s00799-019-00266-3
See at:
International Journal on Digital Libraries | ISTI Repository | International Journal on Digital Libraries | International Journal on Digital Libraries | International Journal on Digital Libraries | International Journal on Digital Libraries | International Journal on Digital Libraries | CNR ExploRA
Steps towards a system to extract formal narratives from text
Metilli D., Bartalesi V., Meghini C.
In this paper we present a first step towards a system to extract for- mal narratives from text. This work is part of a wider research on the introduction of narratives in Digital Libraries. We represent narratives as networks of events, each set in space and time, endowed with factual components, and linked to each other through semantic relations. In order to extract a narrative from text, the first step is to automatically detect and classify the events in the text. We present a software we developed that uses neural networks for event detection and classifica- tion. It was trained on a dataset of annotated biographies of writers and artists from the English Wikipedia and on the ACE 2005 training corpus. We tested the software on the biography of Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. This software constitutes the first component of a broader system for narrative extraction from natural language text.Source: Text2Story 2019 - Second Workshop on Narrative Extraction From Texts, pp. 53–61, Cologne, Germany, 14 April 2019
See at:
ceur-ws.org | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA
Sistemi basati su ontologie per le Digital Humanities
Meghini C., Bartalesi V., Benedetti F., Metilli D.
Un sistema informativo per le Digital Humanities (DH per brevità) é visto come un agente che manipola conoscenza, essendo in grado di accogliere conoscenza dal mondo esterno (funzione di TELL) e di elaborarla in modo appropriato per rispondere a domande relative alla conoscenza posseduta (funzione di ASK). Il nostro gruppo ha fatto propria questa visione e sta lavo-rando da qualche anno ad applicarla nel settore delle DH. La seconda Sezione del paper descrive due progetti in cui tale visione si è esplicata. Nella prima sezione, si argomenta perché la visione risulti paricolarmente fruttuosa per le DH, al di là dei vantaggi che essa porta da un punto di vista ingegneristico.Source: Ital-IA 2019 - Workshop AI for Cultural Heritage, Roma, Italy, 18 marzo 2019
See at:
ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA | www.ital-ia.it
Constructing narratives using NBVT: a case study
Bartalesi V., Metilli D., Meghini C.
Narratives are a fundamental part of human life, starting from the epic poems of the ancient past to modern films. Since the 1970s, much research has been carried out to study the computational representation of narratives. Up to now, there is no standard definition of narrative. In our research, we intend narratives as networks of events defined by a narrator, endowed with participating entities (e.g. persons, location, time) and semantic relations. In this paper, we introduce the Narrative Building and Visualising Tool (NBVT), a semi- automatic software based on a formal ontology for narratives we developed. The tool allows users to construct and visualise narratives using Wikidata as reference knowledge base and Europeana for enriching the narrative with digital objects. As case study, we present the narrative of the life of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt created using NBVT. Since Wikidata is not event-based, our efforts focus on the automatic extraction from Wikidata of the implicit events that compose the narrative. Furthermore, we developed a dedicated functionality in NBVT that finds the Europeana digital objects related to a particular event. This functionality matches the metadata of Europeana digital objects with the event and the participating entities using a similarity algorithm.Source: 8th AIUCD Conference 2019, pp. 169–171, Udine, Italy, 22-25 January 2019
See at:
aiucd2019.uniud.it | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA
A data model-independent approach to big research data integration
Barralesi Lenzi V., Meghini C., Thanos C.
The paper addresses the data integration problem in the context of the scientific domain. The main characteristics of the big research data that make the traditional approach of data integration unfeasible are presented. Two new emerging practices, i.e. an exploratory approach to data seeking and an empiricist epistemological approach to knowledge creation, are discussed. Based on these considerations, we present a new paradigm of data integration and an application ontology that supports it. The ontology is based on five types of events and every event is extensionally modelled as an input/output operation on the involved data entity. The strong point of the ontology and of the whole approach to data integration is that no assumption is made on the data models in which the databases or the views are expressed. This provides a level of generality that successfully deals with the heterogeneity of the domain.Source: International journal of metadata, semantics and ontologies (Print) 13 (2019): 330–345. doi:10.1504/IJMSO.2019.102680
DOI: 10.1504/ijmso.2019.102680
DOI: 10.1504/ijmso.2019.10024347
See at:
ISTI Repository | International Journal of Metadata Semantics and Ontologies | International Journal of Metadata Semantics and Ontologies | CNR ExploRA | International Journal of Metadata Semantics and Ontologies | International Journal of Metadata Semantics and Ontologies | International Journal of Metadata Semantics and Ontologies
Big research data integration
Bartalesi Lenzi V., Meghini C., Thanos C.
The paper presents a vision about a new paradigm of data integration in the context of the scientific world, where data integration is instrumental in exploratory studies carried out by research teams. It briefly overviews the technological challenges to be faced in order to successfully carry out the traditional approach to data integration. Then, three important application scenarios are described in terms of their main characteristics that heavily influence the data integration process. The first application scenario is characterized by the need of large enterprises to combine information from a variety of heterogeneous data sets developed autonomously, managed and maintained independently from the others in the enterprises. The second application scenario is characterized by the need of many organizations to combine information from a large number of data sets dynamically created, distributed worldwide and available on the Web. The third application scenario is characterized by the need of scientists and researchers to connect each others research data as new insight is revealed by connections between diverse research data sets. The paper highlights the fact that the characteristics of the second and third application scenarios make unfeasible the traditional approach to data integration, i.e., the design of a global schema and mappings between the local schemata and the global schema. The focus of the paper is on the data integration problem in the context of the third application scenario. A new paradigm of data integration is proposed based on the emerging new empiricist scientific method, i.e., data driven research and the new data seeking paradigm, i.e., data exploration. Finally, a generic scientific application scenario is presented for the purpose of better illustrating the new data integration paradigm, and a concise list of actions that must be performed in order to successfully carry out the new paradigm of big research data integration is described.Source: International Workshop on Information Search, Integration, and Personalization, pp. 23–37, Fukuoka, Japan, 14/05/ 2018, 15/05/2018
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-30284-9_2
See at:
ISTI Repository | academic.microsoft.com | dblp.uni-trier.de | link.springer.com | link.springer.com | link.springer.com | CNR ExploRA | rd.springer.com
What is needed to digitise knowledge on Heritage Crafts?
Zabulis X., Meghini C., Partarakis N., Kaplanidi D., Doulgeraki P., Karuzaki E., Stefanidi E., Evdemon T., Metilli D., Bartalesi V., Fasoula M., Tasiopoulou E., Beisswenger C.
Heritage Crafts (HCs) involve tangible craft artefacts, materials, and tools and encompass traditional craftsmanship as a form of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Intangible HC dimensions include dexterity, know-how, and skilled use of tools, as well as identity and traditions of the communities in which craftsmanship is, or was, practiced. Despite their cultural significance, efforts towards HC digital representation and presentation are scattered. In the Mingei EU Innovation Action, an approach is developed towards systematising the representation of Heritage Crafts as Cultural Heritage for their preservation. The representation is expected to capture the wide spectrum of knowledge topics that HCs cover, from objects and their making, to hand gestures and tool uses that define craft motor skills, to the societal value, economic impact, and historical significance. In this article, we focus on
the approach towards the creation of a knowledge and its representation. Examples and experiments are presented for two craft instances that are studied in this action.Source: Memoriamedia 1 (2019): 1–25.
Project(s): Mingei
See at:
memoriamedia.net | ISTI Repository | CNR ExploRA
Knowledge Acquisition on Dante Alighieri's works
Locuratolo E. I., Bartalesi Lenzi V.
The approach followed for the identification and the implementation of visualization diagrams able to support the knowledge acquisition on Dante's works is described. Educational aspects of mathematics and statistics underlying the histogram representations are proposed, and the approach to acquire knowledge on Dante's works, starting from visualization diagrams is described. The article is part of the Towards a Digital Dante Encyclopedia, a three-year Italian National Project.Source: Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, edited by Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, pp. 5067–5076. Hershey: IGI Global, 2018
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-2255-3.ch439
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-7659-4.ch030
See at:
academic.microsoft.com | CNR ExploRA | www.igi-global.com | www.igi-global.com | www.igi-global.com | www.igi-global.com
A web application for exploring primary sources: the DanteSources case study
Bartalesi V., Meghini C., Metilli D., Tavoni M., Andriani P.
We present the methodological and technical process we adopted to develop DanteSources, a Web application that allows free access to the knowledge about Dante Alighieri's primary sources, i.e. the works of other authors that Dante cites in his texts. Up to now, this knowledge has been collected in many paper books, making it difficult for the scholars to retrieve it and to produce a complete overview of these data. Using Semantic Web technologies, we developed an ontology expressed in the Resource Description Framework Schema vocabulary providing the terms to represent this knowledge in a machine-readable form. A semi-automatic tool helps the scholars to populate the ontology with the data included in authoritative paper commentaries to Dante's works. Then, the tool automatically saves the resulting Resource Description Framework graph in a triple store. On top of this graph, we developed DanteSources, a Web application that allows users to extract and display the information stored in the knowledge base in the form of charts and tables. Finally, we report the results of a survey to collect suggestions from end-users on their interactions with DanteSources. The methodology and the tools we developed are easily reusable, e.g. to represent the knowledge about primary sources of other authors of the Italian and the international literature.Source: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33 (2018): 705–723. doi:10.1093/llc/fqy002
DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqy002
See at:
ISTI Repository | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities | academic.oup.com | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities | CNR ExploRA